Transcript one of the legend man of our state.Dr Anil Joshix

Dr. Anil Joshi was born in 1955 in
Kotdwara – a small town on the edge
of Uttrakhand, at the foothills of the
Shivalik range of the Himalayas.
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A bright student, he did well through school
and college and after completing his PhD. in
environmental science he eventually joined the
Kotdwara government college as a lecturer
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To the people of the hills in the upper reaches
of India he is no less than a messiah and what
he has achieved is no less than a miracle.
Padmashree Dr. Anil Joshi, or “Sir” as the local
populace refers to him, has made it his life’s
mission to make the villagers in the hills more
self reliant – by promoting the local economy
through local means and by upgrading
generational hand-me-down wisdom.

A bright student, he did well through school
and college and after completing his PhD. in
environmental science he eventually joined the
Kotdwara government college as a lecturer

That was the initial thought with which he tried to
break ice with the locals, telling them that he was a
social worker. But most of the villagers he first
approached shunned him, telling him that since he
was not staying with them, he would not know
enough to help! When he remarked he was a social
worker – they asked why he didn’t think of roads
or schools. But he remained patient and slowly
worked on building his relationship with the hill
community. It’s a relationship which has
prospered in the intervening 29 years and brought
about a silent revolution in the way these
communities exist today.
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decided to give a more formal name and face to
his approach, and thus Himalayan
Environmental Studies and Conservation
Organization or HESCO was formed in 1981.
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the hills were overrun with ‘Kurri’ a wild shrub
which was identified by the HESCO team as a
weed
The sticks were strong enough to be used for
furniture, the flowers and leaves could be used
for incense sticks and the leftovers as fodder
for goats! This has provided employment as
well as monetization.
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HESCO has also worked on upgrading the
local water mill used to grind grain or the
‘gharat’ – to make it an effective tool for power
generation and provided indigenous electricity
to these villages. According to Dr. Joshi, if all
the traditional ‘gharats’ are modernized in the
same way, local employment can mushroom
while at the same time the hills can produce up
to 2500MW of power for the country at
practically no cost!

Stopping landslides and soil erosion using
biological methods; creating a social platform
for women to generate employment and
marketing opportunities; advocating forest fire
prevention and disaster management methods;
circulating a local children’s newspaper; using
local development as a tool to wean away
youth from anti social activities in border states
– these are just some of the activities that
HESCO and Dr. Joshi have been tirelessly
working on to bring about a change.
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Dr. Joshi was awarded the Padamshree in 2006
and HESCO works closely with government
organizations like the Department of Science
and Technology, Department of BioTechnology, BSF, ITBP, CRPF, the Social
Security Board – to name a few.
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I was born in a forest, I loved the trees and the
entire atmosphere. My subject was botany and
most of my papers were on forests. I wanted to
do something more than research,” says Joshi.
“Something that will help society.”
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Joshi thought of controlling the weed by using
it. “Bamboo was one of the worst weeds more
than two centuries ago,” he says. “When
people began using it, it disappeared. So we
decided to find ways of using lantana.”
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Impressed by the various development
programmes for women, the Union department of
science and technology has set up one of India’s
four Women Technology Parks under HESCO at
village Mehuwala near Dehradun. Says Dr Kiran
Rawat, coordinator of the park: “There are at least
35 species of fibre-yielding plants in the
mountains. We taught the women to use the fibre
to make things that are generally made of coir.” It
also offers a two-week training to make pickles,
chutneys, jams and squashes using local fruits and
vegetables.
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HESCO has got village elders to identify medicinal
plants and herbs, and now they are grown in
nurseries in many homes. It has also identified 65
plants whose leaves, barks, flowers, fruit and root
can yield dyes. Women are taught to use the dye
and make marketable items like pouches, file
covers and spectacle cases. All the women trained
in the Women Technology Park later become
members of Women’s Initiative for SelfEmployment (WISE) network to promote and
market their produce.
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Joshi’s sensitivity to the needs of the mountain people goes
far beyond their earnings. “As a child, I was pained by the
drudgery of the people, particularly women. They had to
walk long distances to bring water. And they had to leave
home at an unearthly hour to go into the forests to ease
themselves,” he remembers. Today many villages around
Guar-Chauki have water harvesting tanks and Indian – style
toilets with septic tanks for each house. HESCO has even
devised a multipurpose kit named Kalyani, comprising a
tiny screwdriver, cutter and copper tweezer instead of the
crude gadgets women carried around to trim nails, clean
their ears and remove thorns that hurt as they trudged
through the forests.
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Joshi drew inspiration from Mahatma Gandhi.
“I learnt from Gandhiji that to work for the
people, you have to be very simple,” says Joshi.
“We don’t have a vehicle, it is because the
people we work for don’t have one.”
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Joshi is an Ashoka Fellow, and last year, he
won the Nehru Award and the Ram
Washeshwar Devi Bhatia award. His colleague
Kiran Rawat received a Rs 1 lakh award from
the government. The cash component of these
awards has been spent on the welfare of the
villagers. But Joshi has no time to rejoice: as his
theme song suggests, his path is long and his
destination far.